dsh-webask

WebAsk

Send one-liner questions to DeepSeek's web chat instead of burning your DSH context. Composer button · global hotkey palette · history.

DeepSeek Harness resends the whole conversation on every turn. So a twenty-token question — the kind you already know will be short — does not cost twenty tokens. It costs the entire context window it rides on.

WebAsk hands exactly those questions to the free web chat and never lets them enter the conversation at all.

---

What you get

A button beside the composer

You have already typed the question into DSH. Instead of sending it, click the WebAsk button. The text is lifted out of the draft — cleared through the official input actions, so it never reaches the model — copied to your clipboard, and opened in a new tab.

The button is disabled unless there is a real draft to lift and the composer is in a plain, sendable phase, so it can never fire mid-submission.

A palette on a global hotkey

mod+shift+k anywhere opens a centred input. Type, press Enter, done. Shift+Enter for a newline, Esc to close.

Underneath sits a local history. Every question can be:

• re-opened in the web chat,
• copied again,
• or inserted back into the composer — the closing loop, for when the answer turns out to deserve follow-up in a real session.

A settings tab

Settings → Plugins → WebAsk: target site, URL template, global hotkey, whether to copy to the clipboard, history on/off, and the history limit.

---

An honest note about ?q=

https://chat.deepseek.com/?q=… is a community convention, not a feature of the site. chat.deepseek.com does not read that parameter by itself — userscripts exist specifically to add the behaviour. Pretending otherwise would make this plugin quietly broken for everyone who does not have one installed.

So WebAsk does both things at once, every time:

1. it always copies the question to your clipboard, and
2. it opens the templated URL.

If you do run such a userscript, the flow is fully automatic. If you do not, you press ⌘V once in the tab that just opened. Either way the question costs zero tokens — which is the entire point.

---

Install

dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-webask

Then restart that profile. Plugin installs change the package graph, and the package manifest and client-module metadata are cached for the life of the process — a restart is what picks them up.

Verify before you restart, if you like:

dsh --profile web --dump-config | grep -A2 webask

---

Supported sites

Every preset below speaks the same ?q= convention:

Because the template is editable, a site WebAsk has never heard of works too. Use {q} where the question goes. With no {q} at all, the question is appended as a q= query parameter, preserving whatever else the URL already carries.

---

Privacy

Nothing leaves your machine except the question you chose to ask a web chat, in the tab you opened. History and settings live in this browser's localStorage and are never uploaded. WebAsk sends nothing to the model, and its host half is an empty mount row — no service, no tool, no route.

---

How it works

WebAsk is a presentation-only client plugin. It occupies three documented slots and reaches the composer only through published action faces — it never touches the DOM to read or clear your draft.

Notes for anyone reading the source:

• No build chain. build.mjs is ~40 lines with zero dependencies: it inlines the stylesheet as a string and wraps src/client.js in the CJS closure-factory the browser module loader expects. No bundler, no TypeScript, no CSS pipeline.
• require("react") is resolvable inside the client factory, so the UI is written with React.createElement and needs no JSX transform.
• Strings are registered with ctx.locale with a built-in bilingual fallback, so the UI still reads correctly if the locale service is unavailable.
• The overlay is root-scoped while the draft is per-session. Rather than reaching into the input hub by id, the composer button publishes its own official action face into a tiny shared store; "is there somewhere to insert into?" then has a truthful answer, and the insert-back action is disabled when there is not.

---

Development

npm run build     # src/ -> lib/client.js
npm run verify    # 37 offline checks: slot wiring, click paths, persistence

verify runs the built bundle in a VM against a fake browser and a minimal React stub, then drives the real click paths. It catches a mistyped slot name or a mis-read prop here, rather than as a button that silently does nothing.

---

License

MIT © DanZai233